Though this isn't my main point, I'll start by saying that a lot of your issues can be resolved or at least mostly addressed by way of mods. Specifically stuff like the population, death care -- there are mods to increase population utilization of buildings, lower death rate or increase cim lifespan, etc. They work pretty well.

But that's where I also am beginning to have a problem with the game: a very heavy reliance on mods to really get the experience that a more serious player will prefer after at most a few hours on the vanilla game. I'm not really a super micro-managing perfectionist but even I often find myself wanting certain things from the game every few hours, on a regular basis.

The strength of the mods is that 9 times out of 10, I can find something that gets me what I want. But the weakness -- and this is a huge weakness, and one that will only get worse with time -- of the mods is that every time you add a new mod, you're basically spinning a wheel and if you land on the dreaded 'incompatible' spot then you have conflicts and then you get to spend X amount of time turning mods on and off trying to figure out what exactly is not playing nice. The worst part isn't even this, it's that every time a mod is updated, or the game is patched, you run a chance of having to do this, with a smaller but still existant chance that something somewhere might corrupt your entire save file.

I guess my point is that, mods and modability aren't -- and shouldn't -- be the end-all, be-all of a good game that is supposed to have longevity. At the least, a game like Cities:Skylines should have come out of the box with more powerful mod compatibility tools/frameworks/whatever to help take the pain out of making sure mods play nice and stuff, or at least a better way of managing mods. Any game that is going to have mods as a major selling point should strive to have that, I think.